The house of John Lowe, Double murderer and quadruple dog killer
John Lowe is one of the oldest convicted double murderers in the UK at the age of 82 being sentenced to life in prison. He was responsible for the deaths of Christine Lee and Lucy Lee
Talking about Lucy’s actions on that day, Ms Banner said: “The courage of her final words inspire me. She was so very brave. I am trying hard to draw on her strength and live up to her high standard as I move forward with my life but it is hard.
“John Lowe brutally and deliberately murdered my mum and my sister by shooting each of them at close range with a shotgun – they did not stand a chance.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-29818868
The location was set to be demolished and have 3 new houses erected back in june 2016. A fresh start to a location deeply tied with sadness. However out of the 63 local residents surveyed about the renovation of the area 50 opposed the plan, leading to it being rejected in july of the same year. A further appeal was lodged in march in 2017 but it was dismissed. So the future of the property look like it is set to continue to wither away and remain a reminder of the actions of an evil old man
Shoot 1 – edits and originals
The location was harder than expected to find as their a multiple properties in Farnham listed as keepers cottage. So when finally arrived at the property the sun was setting, which although made the images look more ominous and eerie, however it was quiet challenging for multiple reasons. The flash on my D3300 made the images to washed out and lacked a strong and defined contrast. I was also experimenting with a old lens on my A6000 (read more below) which requires a lot of light to look appealing
Contact Sheet
Due to the less then ideal conditions of this shoot I didn’t end up with many images I wanted to edit (see below) [[talk about images]]
Shoot 2 – edits and originals
Contact Sheet
Due to the previous shoot being to dark I decided to revisit this location in the middle of the day, with the hope of capturing better images. As per the the last shoot I used the same kit; D3300 with a kit lens & A6000 with my old lens
I also edited an image as I wanted to try and add fake fog to make the image look more atmospheric and chilling. I did this by rendering a cloud over the image in a new layer and making the layer effect screen so the black on the clouds became see through, then perspective warping it to match the angle of the ground. Finally I created a black layer mask, then painted over where I wanted the fog with a “low flow, low opacity” brush. I repeated this several times till I got the effect I desired
A6000 with new lens
Whilst on a trip to Poland I discovered an antiques stall selling all sorts of old and past their time, so I thought it would be interesting to try and find something here that I could use in my work that is passed its time. I found a old film camera that was no longer functioning, However the lens looked amazing. So I bought the lens an ordered a lens adapter to make it fit my a6000.
This lens has an amazing depth effect which creates exquisite background blur on the images, however this can only be achieved at a low f-stop (wider aperture) One downside of this is it can give a “soft” focus to the images, made worse by the fact that the lens is solely a manual focus lens as it was designed for an old film camera.
It also helped to further link to my idea of time, using an outdated lens.
Pairings of juxtaposing images (small/large)
I decided to pair images based on how strongly they contrast each other whether that be though the size of the subject or the colours. I did this to highlight their differences and make the images stand out more.
My favourite pairing is the second, the dog with the door. This is because the images are strangely similar, even though that’s the complete opposite effect I was going for as the only juxtaposing thing is the size of the subjects. They have similar colours (dominantly green), both have a clear focus point and very similar gradual vignetting in the bottom right of the image.
Time 